Insignia Thermal Compound

Recently I was in need of some thermal paste to apply on my CPU and stopped in a local Best Buy to see what they had in stock.  The only two options were Insignia Thermal Compound 5-grams for $6.99 and Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut 1-gram, thermal grease for $13.99. Thermal Grizzly is one of the best products for max cooling but I knew I could go through the 5 grams easily and would like to have the extra for backup. 

I'm going to compare this compound with the only thermal paste I have used in the last several years.  Arctic Silver 5. An applicator comes in the package so that you can easily spread the compound around. Compared to AS5 this compound runs a little easier. The Insignia Thermal Compound runs within 1-2 degrees of AS5 on both my CPU and GPU. 

 AMD FX-9370.  This 220 watt TDP processor is recommended to use with water cooling. The CPU pushes around 38 degrees Celsius max using my 360mm closed loop system.

AMD MSI R9 390 also has this applied and while running the fan speed at 70% it stays at or below 70 degrees Celsius when maxed with the stock cooler on the GPU. 

This was far better results than I expected to get with this store brand compound. I have tried both the pea size and spread method on the CPU and GPU.  Results for me were more consistent spreading this compound out. For a great all around paste I would probably still recommend one like Arctic MX-4.  But if you need something fast and see this at a local Best Buy do not worry, it gets the job done and does it pretty well!

ALTEC VISION Gaming Glasses Stainless Steel Frame

I done a lot of research on Anti UV glasses before choosing the ALTEC VISION gaming glasses and I'm completely satisfied with my buy.  The glasses also came with a cheap hard case and microfiber lens cloth!

I do a fair bit of gaming on PC and after trying a pair of GAMMA RAY glasses from a friend I decided some Anti UV glasses were a must have!  After wearing these a bit if you regularly use screens you will notice less eye strain.  Getting to sleep may also be easier if you use these.  There is a slight yellow tint but seconds after wearing them I forget about it.  The steel frame feels sturdy but as others mention the screws may need tightened after a bit of use.  I have had these for three months now and have had no issues with scratches.

When researching Anti UV glasses I had a hard time choosing because EVERY pair had mentions of getting easy scratches or hard to remove smudges.  If you need to clean the glasses its recommended to never wipe them while dry. Run some light warm water over the lens before cleaning with the microfiber lens cloth.  Make sure no dust or dirt is on the glasses or cloth, the filters used in glasses like these are easily scratched!  Using this method should deal with both problems keeping your glasses smudge and scratch free.  If you are having issues with smudges your cloth may be dirty and need cleaning.

The ALTEC VISION gaming glasses are $14.99 on Amazon which is where I got mine.

Conan Exiles

This review is for the PVE part of the game only.

Conan Exiles is a beautiful, fun game to explore. Sadly for the PVE part I feel like content is extremely limited and can get boring pretty fast.  Conan is a survival game that has PVE, PVP, or PVE with PVP at certain times.  Survival at first can be tedious as you gather and craft your tools, weapons, and first set of clothes eating bugs on the way to a water source. Crafting a bedroll and placing it down will let you spawn there if you die. You will have to find a good spot to build a base so that you can craft the utilities needed to produce better weapons and gear.  Once you have a base you can make a bed to spawn at that base and lay down a bedroll somewhere else for an alternative spawn point. Don't forget about the purge. Its a timed event that spawns NPCs that could attack and destroy your entire base if you don't have protection with pets or thralls. When it works right. There are server settings that can change how purges (and everything) works but for normal settings if you are on a server alone it will always pick you and attack your base once a day. The server that I mainly played on had purges until the last update which seemed to break them. You can find player made map-rooms which allow you to teleport to obelisks that you will find while out and exploring. Crafting a map-room of your own will require higher level character and gear to find the recipe and gather the necessary ingredients. Weather also plays a role in Conan. It can speed up your metabolism making you thirsty and hungry. It can even start taking your health if you get too hot or too cold so you have to wear armor appropriate for the right environment. This also applies for your base but only really matters in cold locations, you may have to build for warmth. There are lesser bosses that you may be able to take on alone and there are some that will require you to bring a few friends along with. There are a few dungeons that are relatively small. Conan also features a perk you may know from Zelda Breath of the Wild. You can climb pretty much anything. It may be tricky at first but jumping from the top of a mountain and catching on and repeating until you are at the bottom can be extremely fun!  Just don't mess up or that could mean you lose everything!  Yeah if you die by default server settings you will lose everything on your character.  If You can get back to your dead body in time you can save all of your lost items.  

Finding creations from other players is the funnest enjoyment I had got from the game. You can find fortresses with amazing detail and everyone has different tastes. I saw incredibly large player made bases, pyramids, and even known walls to have been built around other players bases when they are blocking certain resources or areas. On the downside occasionally I have had the load times of the player made bases slow to load which can lead to invisible walls and even damage your character.

Building bases can be very fun and sometimes frustrating. Weird placement issues on the ground and items refusing to attach no matter what.  Building backwards or from the top down would be the only way to accomplish certain tasks. Fun fact, if you have issues placing a piece you can try to remove any doors around the area. This once solved an issue that was four blocks away from the doorway. Anything crafted and placed down or made will have a set decay timer so that the servers do not get clogged up with unused buildings. The timer is 144 hours and should reset as long as you or someone in your clan logs in to reset the timers. Everything has to be connected around your base to have the same timer, if it is not connected it will have a different timer that you will have to reset by interacting with.

The combat is fun at first using different weapons and mixing combos but the netcode and some of the animations feel completely broken. Certain enemies feel glitchy like the Rhino who you can get stuck in their horns and often has teleported mid charge. The bows were useless in my experience unless you use them to just pull enemies with. Some weapons like the spear has incredible range and can stun lock very fast. There is also a religious system that allows you to build altars. Each having a small benefit and eventually leading to the ability to summon large avatars to help demolish enemy bases in PVP servers.

The pet and thrall system is laughable. Its about the worst AI I have ever saw. Capturing the pets is easy as running over the young animal and pressing the interact key. Both will just stand there once placed. Sometime they will defend your base, sometimes they wont. The Thrall randomly decide if they will use the weapons in their inventory. Instead of having attack or defend options when one is following you, they will only attack something if you get hit first. Many times I have ran inside a building or shelter and had problems getting back out because my pet is blocking the doorway and refuse to move. Sometimes "replacing" them in another location will work but some locations you can not do this. You do have to feed both pets and thralls to keep them alive now. This is nice because before the pet update leftover thralls were literally everywhere and even standing on invisible platforms where old bases used to be.

Overall I've enjoyed Conan Exiles and had a blast building a base and exploring the world of Conan with a few friends. Overall I am at 200 hours and may put in a few more but I do not expect to play much longer. Over half of that time is gathering and building. Normally I welcome PVP in games but I really wanted this to be a PVE experience and would love more content.

Ajazz GTX Wired Gaming Mouse

I really was in a rut wanting to but not needing to upgrade my mouse for a year.  Researching hundreds of gaming mice for at least a year I could not find a mouse I really wanted.  Both a friend and I decided to give the Ajazz GTX a try and we do not regret it.  When I first saw the mechanical mouse builds I laughed but with these features and solid durability for the price of $25.99, you can not beat the value!

This is a solid mouse that has up to 4000 dpi. You can adjust the dpi on the fly with a button right behind the mouse wheel. There are two different shapes for the back of the mouse for personal preference on grip.  Adjusting a screw on the back you can adjust the height making the mouse shorter or longer.  Using this feature the mouse can be adjusted for claw or palm grip!  There is also the option to add four 5-gram weights to make this a fairly heavy mouse. Weighing in at 5.4 ounces (compared to the Logitech G502 being 4.3 ounces)  The tracking is smooth and accurate. Being an avid FPS gamer this is my weapon.

Few other features that sold me on this mouse is the Omron switches which will give you plenty of smooth clicks, 1000hz polling rate, sniper button, onboard memory and very important for a gaming mouse is the software.

The mouse has downloadable software that has every option a gaming mouse should have. You can find the software here in the FAQ section.  It has a clean and easy to use interface and works great with Windows 10.  You have several options to rebind all of the buttons to if desired. You can set each dpi to display any color you want the LEDs to be. This helps you know exactly what dpi your mouse is set to! You can also select different polling rates and effects like breathing for the LEDs.

Once you setup the mouse with the software there is no need to have it running on your computer.  The onboard memory will store all settings on the mouse!  It does not matter if you format your computer or take the mouse to another computer.  It will still be setup the way you chose!

I cant say enough great things about this mouse.  It took me a little bit to get used to the feel of it but now I'm in love.

If you are interested in the mouse you can find it here on Amazon - Ajazz GTX Gaming Mouse

Blacklight Retribution Open Beta Review

Blacklight Retribution is Perfect World Entertainment's free to play FPS!  It has just released in open beta. Blacklight Retribution is a fast paced shooter with modes of TDM, DM, DOM, CTF, and TKOTH.  I have tried just about every F2P first person shooter and there is only a few I consider good enough to keep playing.  Blacklight Retribution falls in this category with great graphics, many game modes, a smooth engine, and support from the developers.

When first installing a game, the first thing I do is go into the settings and set everything up.  Blacklight Retribution has a huge range of graphic settings that you can adjust so that you can get the most out of the game. Gameplay settings has options of crouch and aim down sights toggle with customizable cross-hairs.  You can change the size, shape, color and how your cross-hair and reticle look like.  As if these options are not enough, there are several tweaks you can do in the game's ini text configuration file if you are having performance issues.

You start off at level one, leveling up your soldier as you kill and complete game-mode objectives. You unlock several gear and weapon customizations that you can buy with in-game gp.  Gear and weapons both have several stats that each piece of gear can change.  For example gear can give you more speed and health while for weapons you can customize your gun so that you change its damage, bullet spread, reload time, range, and more.  Almost all gear, weapons, and weapon parts can be bought with in-game money earned from just playing the game.  The different type of weapons you can get to customize is the default assault rifle, combat rifle, burst rifle, sniper rifle, and the light machine gun.  Almost all gear and weapons can be bought for just a day, three days, a week, or permanently using the in game money.

You can also make emblems.  You have three different list of images you can mix together and change colors to go beside your name.  You can see every players emblem in the game lobby and the scoreboard.  If you look at the picture above you can see these emblems, my game name is BoyScout.

There is also nodes and node sockets.  As you play you will earn nodes which give you several different advantages.  You can place these nodes in one of the five node sockets.  You can make a node stronger by trying to fuse the same types together.

After all of the customizations you may be worried higher level players will have a huge advantage having better stuff unlocked.  It will be hard to take down players that are already really good, but as a low level I did not have problems with over powered opponents.  I believe it is balanced enough to give everyone a chance and you will also have other low level opponents.  If a specific enemy is able to out perform you every time you can always use HRV to see where they are on the map and stay away from them.

Getting into a match is simple. By hitting play you will have several games come up showing game type, map, players, and ping.  Before a match is started you will be in a lobby where you can have a brief time to talk to other players, customize your loadout, or adjust anything you may need to.  When the match starts it will not take you to the game until you hit begin, so if you are in the middle of customizing your loadout you do not have to worry about rushing.

Once you begin the game you will usually spawn close to your team and use the HRV feature.  This feature is basically a legitimate wall-hack.  For a short period of time you can use the HRV, then you will have to wait for it to recharge before you use it again.  The recharge time for the HRV is not long at all, it will keep the action fast and fresh showing where the enemies are and their name in bright red. 

From here you have all of the basic FPS mechanics from crouch and melee to jump.  Using the melee feature, you can equip several different items to increase the damage or just use the stock of your gun.  Using the stock of your gun will take out opponents in one or two blows if they are already damaged.

During the match you have the option of using pods which are placed in several locations in each map.  Each pod uses cp points which are gained by killing the opponents and completing game-mode objectives.  By running up and hitting your use key you can regenerate your health and ammo or get things like rocket launchers, flame throwers, or the hard-suit.  The hard-suit is a machine you can get into with mini-guns and rockets to boost your kills and help your team win.  While walking around in this hard-suit you are not invincible but regular guns does minimal damage to it.  Sneaking up on a hard-suit with a flame thrower can burn the pilot out and steal the machine.

Each match is set to a time limit of ten minutes and also has score limits.  Each game mode has different score limits.  The matches are in perfect length in my opinion. If you do not like a  particular map it will not take forever to get to another.

When you are in the match lobby or game lobby you can click your name to see your mailbox, friend list, all of the items you currently have purchased, and report hackers.  If you come across someone that looks very suspicious BLR has a very nice report feature here where you can enter the name of the player, select one of several reasons you are reporting them, and leave a comment for a more detailed description.

Conclusion:
One thing I love about this game is the fact that the developers show that they care.  They read and reply to the forums.  They take in what people say and answer questions.  This game is in open-beta but already feels complete to me.  New features will be added and optimizations will be done.  Good graphics, smooth game-play, and fast paced action makes this one fun as hell game to play.

If you have any questions about this game I will be glad to answer them!  I want to help the community grow so this game will continue to rock!

You can download the game here
http://blacklight.perfectworld.com/download

System Requirements:

• Operating System
• Minimum: Windows® XP / Vista / Windows 7 (32-bit)
• Recommended: Windows 7 (64-bit)

CPU: Minimum: Dual-Core CPU / Recommended: Quad-Core CPU 
RAM: Minimum: 2 GB of RAM / Recommended: 4 GB of RAM 
Hard Disk: 8GB Free HD Space

Graphics: Minimum: Geforce 8xxx or Radeon HD2xxx / Recommended: 1GB+ DX11 GPU

Cresyn CS-HP600K Headphone Review

This review is for the Cresyn CS-HP600K.  Let me start off by saying I am no audiophile. I do enjoy good sound.  I have owned many types of headphones and headsets, using every set for gaming and listening to music.  As I was getting back into PC gaming, I needed a new cheap pair of headphones for online FPS.  After a good bit of research, I chose to give these Cresyn CS-HP600K headphones a chance. I had never heard of the brand before and there were not many reviews on this product.  My PC has the Creative XtremeAudio PCI sound card for this review.

Specs:

• Type: Closed air, dynamic
• Driver Units: 38mm
• Frequency Range: 20-20,000 Hz
• Impedance: 35 Ω
• Sensitivity: 100 dB/mW
• Cord Length: 1.5m (4.92 ft)
• Plug type: 3.5mm Stereo gold-plated plug
• Weight: 138g (4.87 oz) w/o cord

Introduction:
These headphones come with a  6.3mm stereo gold-plated adapter and a nice little case that can be used to transport these headphones and protect them from dust.  When I first saw these headphones, I thought they were small, not big and bulky like most circumaural over-ear headphones.

Unfolding the headphones rotate them out into position.  You can expand the length so it should fit most people comfortably without being too tight.  Across the top head band, you have nice padded cushions on the left and right portions with a very small gap cushioned where the headband bends for folding and storing.  The ear padding is very soft and comfortable and is comfortable for long periods of time.  Being called "over-ear" headphones they felt a bit different than other types that I have owned.  The cans are small but they allow your ear to slide into the ear piece.

While these are not noise-canceling headphones, they do block out a lot of sound.  While audio is streaming I can not hear anything.  Also, while being worn sound does not leak out so it will not annoy others.

The cord length is pretty short at 1.5m (4.92 ft), but if you are like me and plug them straight into your speakers, you should be fine.

Durability:
When buying headphones one of the biggest things I pay attention to is reviews of durability.  So many "good quality sounding" headphones have very poor reviews due to durability.  I was not able to find much on these headphones and was worried on how durable they would be.  The Cresyn CS-HP600K are solid headphones.  They are solid enough to withstand dropping and some banging around.  As with any folding headphones you have a bigger chance of issues with the headphones breaking where they fold.  If I have any problems with this issue, I will update this review!

Sound Quality:
The sound quality is amazing for such cheap headphones.  I have owned and tried several headphones and headsets ranging from Tritton Ax 51 Pro, Everglide S500, Sennheiser HD212, Niko-650HP, and more.  These CS-HP600K sound better than all of these, even better than the Sennheiser HD212.  It puts out enough bass to be satisfying yet it is not overwhelming and sound quality is loud and clear.

Conclusion:
These headphones were a steal for only $20. They have overall quality that you would usually pay more for.  Feeling durable enough to last, the only thing that can be much of a con is the shorter cord length.  These headphones are very comfortable and look pretty stylish while being worn instead of big and bulky.  My overall conclusion is if you do not have much to spend and you want good sounding quality headphones, these will be a great choice!

If you are interested in these headphones here is a great deal at Newegg.com!
Newegg

The Witcher 2 review

 

Gameplay:

Geralt of Rivia comes back in the sequel The Witcher 2, hunting the king slayer who framed him for killing King Foltest.  Not much has changed in this game from the first game. You have magic through different signs and swordsmanship to help you fight through all of the enemies and creatures.  You can build up your character as you level to make your magic, swordsmanship, and alchemy stronger.  As the witcher, he always carries two swords.  One sword made of steel to fight the human enemies and a sword made of silver for slaying the creatures of the game.  

Weapons and equipment both can be upgraded with runes and armor enhancements so that you can make your gear even better.  You can also earn and buy diagrams for making your own sword and gear which turn out to be considerably cheaper if you have or can get the materials for making them.  On top of crafting you have alchemy.  You can earn or buy formulas to make several different type of potions that benefit you in many ways.  You have to meditate to use the majority of these potions, so you will have to be out of combat!  Some potion-made enhancements can be placed on your swords at anytime.

The game campaign has game changing decisions that you will have to make for Geralt which in turn makes the game even longer to play if you want to see all the different variations that you can end up with. Throughout the game you will always have the main quest with several side quests you can accept to level your character faster and earn more money.  There are also some small mini-game like options including arm-wrestling, dice poker, and fist fights.  All are relatively easy, especially the fist fights where you have to use the WASD keys when it tells you to.  If you pay attention you will not lose a fight the whole game.  The Witcher 2 then takes things to the next level letting you go into the inns and have sex with hookers.  Bribing with the right amount of coin will earn you a R rated cut scene that is not shy to show anything.  

I played the game on Hard, and being somewhat challenging it did take a little getting used to. Once I learned how to control my character it was pretty easy.  The boss fights can be a little tricky, but using the right mix of signs and swords will make most fall pretty easy.  There are four difficulty levels you can choose from: Easy, Normal, Hard, and Insane.  I can imagine insane would be pretty tough and you would constantly need to rely on a lot of potions, bombs, and traps to survive.  Hard mode will probably be the funner choice for most gamers! 

The sound in The Witcher 2 is pretty good.  Nice effects of hearing the wind howl, monsters growl, guards yelling, hookers moaning, and the clinging of swords.  There is so much more than just that but while using headphones I could even tell which direction I was about to get attacked from. 

There is one additional game mode called Arenas.  In arenas you are setup in an arena against the odds, each win you will get points and a choice between weapon or gear.  It is a nice little game mode if you want to just jump in and beat some butt.

Graphics and optimization:
The Witcher 2 is a beautiful game.  There are great graphics with sharp textures and detailed environments.  The grass will sway, blood will stain your sword, everything in the distance does not look like a flat picture but rather like it is actually there.  On my PC the game runs great averaging 50-60+ FPS the entire time.  You may notice the game stutters for a split second every now and then, this is due to it loading things from the hard drive.  It is not an inconvenience or a big stutter and according to your hard drive setup you may not even notice these load times!


Conclusion:
The Witcher 2 was a very fun game for me to play through.  The combat is fun and fluid, giving you different ways to play the game.  There is also a lot of depth with the different story changing decisions you have to make.  Nice range of difficult levels for all type of gamers.  Beautiful environment with some of the best PC graphics.  This is one of the few games I was sad to beat, but you can always play more to choose the different paths!


GRAPHICS: 10/10
GAMEPLAY: 9/10
SOUND:  9/10
OVERALL:  10/10